Monthly Archives: March 2015

By Chemeketa Public Affairs

A public meeting of the Budget Committee of Chemeketa Community College, Marion County, State of Oregon, to receive the budget for the fiscal year July 1, 2015 to June 30, 2016 will be held at Chemeketa Community College, Building 2 Boardroom, 4000 Lancaster Drive NE, Salem. The meeting will take place on the 8th day of April at 7:00 p.m. The purpose is to receive the budget message and document of the district. A copy of the budget document may be inspected on or after April 9, 2015 at the Chemeketa Community College Library, second floor of Building 9 between the hours of 8:00 a.m. and 4:30 p.m.

An additional Budget Committee meeting will take place on April 15, 2014 at 4:30 p.m. to receive additional budget information, deliberate and take public comment. The meeting will be held at Chemeketa Community College, Building 2 Boardroom, 4000 Lancaster Drive NE, Salem. This is a public meeting where deliberation of the Budget Committee will take place. Any person may appear at the meeting and discuss the proposed programs with the Budget Committee.

By Chemeketa Public Affairs

As job prospects pick up some employers are finding it difficult to fill open positions. A State of Oregon Employment Department survey published March 25th found that job vacancies in the state increased 40% from 2013 to 2014 for a total of 45,402 openings. Employers reported that 51% of those openings were “difficult to fill.”

Chemeketa is determined to be part of the solution. President Julie Huckestein joined Salem-Keizer Public Schools Superintendent Christy Perry in a shared presentation at the State of Education Forum, Wednesday, April 1. The event was co-sponsored by the Salem Area Chamber of Commerce, the Downtown Salem Rotary Club and the Salem City Club. Huckestein and Perry teamed up to demonstrate to community leaders that, as the superintendent put it, “our gift to the Salem-Keizer community is how well we work together.”

Sometimes higher education is cast as being in competition with primary education because the Legislature has to make tough calls allocating limited funds to both systems. Huckestein had an opportunity to counter that perspective when she participated in an educational forum with Rep. Paul Evans at Chemeketa Eola the evening of March 31.

“I don’t think anyone should argue that one doesn’t deserve more (funding), because there hasn’t been enough for a long time,” she said. “We’re dealing with human beings and we’re dealing with a lot of the same issues they bring to the classroom every day.”

The two public education CEO’s showed the depth and breadth of their career technical offerings and how high school and post-secondary partnerships provide pathways to employment in high-growth industries.

By Chemeketa Public Affairs

“When They Fall, They Always Make Noise”, a exhibit featuring the works of southern Oregon artist Renee Couture, will be on display at Chemeketa Community College’s Gretchen Schuette Art Gallery from March 31 to May 5.

An artist’s reception will be held on April 8 from 12:30 to 2:30 p.m., with an artist’s talk at 1:30 p.m.

Couture, who is a fine arts instructor at Umpqua Communtiy College in Roseburg, mixes sculpture, photography and installation in her pieces, examining the interconnectivity of capitalism, environment and one’s community.

“Using my own rural community as a starting point, I articulate the complexity and range of the public with their nearby landscape,” Couture said in her artist’s statement.

Couture received her bachelor’s from Buena Vista University in Iowa and her master’s from Vermont College of Fine Arts. Before moving to Oregon, she spent four years working throughout North and South America in various jobs including a camp counselor, wildland firefighter and artisan goat cheese maker. She uses a converted 20-foot travel trailer in her garden as a studio.

The gallery is located in Building 3 on the Salem campus and is open from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Friday when classes are in session.

By Chemeketa Public Affairs

A glow-in-the-dark basketball. That’s the trophy in the annual Students vs. Staff Smackdown basketball game.

And in the 11th iteration of this annual Chemeketa Community College tradition, held March 17 on Paldanius Court at the Salem campus, the crowd was entertained by two teams that came out for a bit of fun on the hardwood — and possession of a glow-in-the-dark basketball.

The game has held many different functions over the years, including scholarship fundraising. This year, halftime offered the opportunity to pay to take half-court shots, with the proceeds benefitting the purchasing of a school mascot costume.

The student team this year was organized by Ethan Chung from the Office of Student Retention and College Life. The staff team was organized by physics instructor Erik Jensen.

By Chemeketa Public Affairs

Dr. Cable Green had every faculty member in the audience at Chemeketa Community College’s Salem campus auditorium raise their hands.

Then, he told them to lower their hands if they had never had a student who skipped on buying an assigned textbook for their class.

Needless to say, there wasn’t much movement.

There’s a lot more to the cost of higher education than tuition. The average college student spends more than $1,300 per year on textbooks. And that’s what brought Green, director of global learning for Creative Commons, to Chemeketa on March 4.

Green asked the audience to consider the possibility of open educational resources, or OERs. OERs are classroom materials such as textbooks, supplemental instructor materials and multimedia than are released under open licenses that allow creators to maintain their copyrights while giving those creators the ability to allow others to use their works if they wish.

In his keynote, Green pointed to surveys showing that two-thirds of college students have not purchased a required textbook at some point. Half of students say they take fewer classes during a term or semester in order to afford books. A third of students said they have purposely avoided classes or majors in order to reduce book costs.

“How are your students supposed to learn with materials they can’t afford and are not buying?” Green asked the audience.

In addition to the cost savings to students, Green also proposed OERs as a way for faculty to have additional control over the materials in their courses. A course instructor would be able to edit and modify OERs, share those materials for others to also use or review and even involve students in the continual updating of material.

“Nobody knows better what your students need than you,” Green said.

Green encouraged instructors who are not already using OERs in their classes to look at some before placing their next textbook order and told college administrators to figure out how to best support faculty who want to build OERs for their courses.

In addition to his presentation at Chemeketa, Green joined President Julie Huckestein and Associate Vice President/Chief Information Officer Tim Rogers at the State Capitol to testify before the House Committee on Higher Education, Innovation and Workforce Development.

The presentation sparked plenty of questions from the legislators on the committee.

Huckestein told the committee the college has formed a Textbook Sticker Shock Committee to both bring greater awareness of textbook costs to college staff and also provide opportunities for faculty and staff to collaborate on reducing the costs of textbooks.

She also pointed out that textbook costs add even more financial burden to a student having to take pre-college courses.

“For some students, that can add eight more courses,” Huckestein told the House members.

Rogers noted work already done at Chemeketa includes offering price comparisons at the bookstore, making more titles available to rent or buy as an e-book, more aggressively negotiating directly with publishers for lower prices, increasing internal audits of course material in some departments whether the material is an OER or not, and also making preparations at the library to house increased OERs.

“This is not an area where anybody seems to be digging their heels in,” Rogers told the committee.